Astronomers don’t lose hope in finding signs of life dwelling on Mars, and now they’re shifting their focus elsewhere than before. Searching for signs of any organism living on the Red Planet’s surface using advanced rovers didn’t reveal anything so far.
A recent hypothesis was to search for Martian life below the Red Planet’s soil since cosmic radiation is able to kill all amino acids from the surface. Therefore, searching for little green men or anything else that can mean living organisms in Martian caves sounds like a good idea.
Let’s leave it on ReachBot
According to CNN, scientists now want to count on ReachBot for the job of exploring Martian caves in the search for alien life. The robot is almost the size of a soccer ball, and it’s capable of many impressive things, including climbing, grabbing objects and making its way through steep Martian caves, etc.
Stephanie Newdick, who’s a doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University’s School of Engineering, explained as CNN quotes:
Caves are risky environments, but they’re scientifically interesting,
Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area.
Considering life as scientists know it from Earth, it’s impossible for it to exist on Mars. There’s no liquid water on our neighboring planet, which is perhaps the biggest downside. All life on Earth relies on liquid water to survive. But since nobody can possibly know what combinations the emergence of life may be based on in the case of other planets, astronomers don’t lose hope.
It was back in 2018 that the whole idea of the ReachBot started, thanks to the director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at Stanford University, Mr. Marco Pavone.
ReachBot is still in the concept phase, so there’s plenty more time to wait until we can eventually see it in action.
